PEEVALEXCE OF MORTGAGES. 349 



love of this kind of display too often leads the poorer 

 farmer to spend upon a house what he must raise by a 

 mortgage upon his farm, and is frequently the cause of 

 his losing both house and farm to a pressing mortgagee, 

 and being compelled to begin the world in a log-house 

 anew. 



Among the matters of social economy, indeed, which 

 have struck me most, not only in the British provinces, 

 but in iSI"ew England and in the eastern States of the 

 Union, is the very wide extent to which, according to the 

 information I received, the property of these small farm 

 proprietors is mortgaged. The surest way of obtaining 

 possession of a coveted farm is to advance money on it 

 by mortgage, as, in a very large majority of cases, the 

 unhappy borrower is unable to pay off his debt. It may 

 be the consequence of the failures of crops of late years, 

 or of that general imprudence of the farmers in the 

 lumbering districts to which I alluded in my former 

 chapters on New Brunswick ; but that these records of 

 debt and difficulty among the farming community of 

 North America generally are at the present time very 

 numerous, there is no reason to doubt. 



This Eimouski district is a lumbering country still to 

 some extent, and, in consequence, labour is dearer than 

 in the other counties. From £18 to £25 currency, with 

 board and lodging, are the wages of a farm-servant 5 

 while carpenters and other handicraftsmen receive a 

 dollar a-day. That wages should be so much higher 

 here than they are a couple of days' journey up the 

 river, shows either how unwilling the natives are to 

 leave their own neighbourhood, or how little is the 

 intercourse which exists between the inhabitants of the 

 different counties. 



The whole drive down the St Lawrence — in fact, the 

 course of the river itself — is along the strike of the older 

 Silurian beds. The country which the road traverses 



